Let me begin by saying I have a high tolerance for ridiculous television, especially as rendered by Netflix. When I want to turn off my brain, I will happily watch inane reality shows about people finding love on an island or selling overpriced real estate. I have watched every season of Emily in Paris. But I’ve never witnessed such a car crash in such excruciating slow motion as Netflix’s current #1 new series, Fool Me Once.
Fool Me Once is part of Netflix’s massive deal to adapt the thriller novels of author Harlan Coben. The team behind this outing also gave us a Netflix adaptation of Coben’s The Stranger, which was not stellar but which I watched without a lingering hangover of regret. I adore mysteries and crime procedurals, and I’ve seen a lot of them, in every range of quality. This is, without a doubt, one of the weakest offerings of the genre, despite an intriguing premise.
Fool Me Once features a curious puzzle at its kick-off: U.K. army veteran Maya (Michelle Keegan) lost her sister and then her husband to brutal, seemingly unrelated murders. But shortly after burying her husband, Joe (a criminally underused Richard Armitage), she watches footage from her nanny cam that seems to show Joe alive and well in their house, visiting their young daughter. That’s the hook that gets you watching, but the bait is rotten. The nanny cam incident compels Maya to slip-shoddily investigate other mysteries related to Joe, his Sackler-esque pharmaceutical dynasty family, Maya’s own family, and a decades-old posh school scandal thrown in for bad measure. Unfortunately, all of these plots and subplots are a mishmash of inane, predictable, cliched, absurd, and unnecessary. Take your pick.
Even when a TV series or movie is awful, I feel bad about panning it: I think about how many people—hundreds, sometimes thousands—devoted big chunks of their lives and a lot of hard work to making it happen. So let me say a few nice things: Fool Me Once looks pretty, with gleaming cars and glossy surfaces in its fancy houses. The cast, especially the always-compelling Adeel Akhtar (watch him instead in Sherwood) as DS Sami Kierce, are game; they seem to be trying their hardest to get their mouths around atrocious dialogue and head-scratching narrative swerves. That’s the end of the nice things I have to say about Fool Me Once. This is the sort of show where major revelations happen because someone hears a name and then the camera zooms in to watch them slowly google the name on their phone, revealing an address or a LinkedIn profile, upon which they go to speak to that person, and learn the name of someone else to search for on the internet. I’m not exaggerating the level of detective work at play in countless scenes—grandma-level googling, with an apology to grandmas.
Some of my outrage here emerged from the fact that I watched Fool Me Once hard on the news of the cancellation of Max’s charming queer pirate drama Our Flag Means Death. It feels obscene to me that a property like Fool Me Once gets such a spotlight and massive distribution push from Netflix, with many, many adaptations of its similar Coben-ilk planned for future release, while groundbreaking, inclusive, and innovative series struggle to get a greenlight or a new season. We’re in the era of “two-screen TV,” clumsily pieced-together products that you can watch while looking at your phone or deep-cleaning your oven. iNews went a step further, calling Fool Me Once “junk food television” and also “drivel.” Whatever else it is, Fool Me Once is a surefire sign of our times—cynically bleak, lacking sense and substance, with the barest of nods to systemic inequality and a tilt of its empty head toward wartime atrocities.
Major spoilers for Fool Me Once ahead.
Huge amounts of plodding time are spent on subplots that go nowhere, for no apparent reason. The depiction of the police is so laughable it boggles belief—they are always arresting people without cause, then letting them go when the suspects disagree with their assessment. They reveal sensitive criminal information to random people, and seem to think it’s fine for civilian suspects to carry out their own investigations. (Here’s one example of dozens: early on, Maya gets pepper-sprayed by the nanny after asking her about the nanny cam footage, and the nanny claims Maya assaulted her; the detective in charge seems to think it’s cool for Maya to go confront the nanny about this by herself. Maya proceeds to run the nanny off the road in her car and search for her in the woods after physically assaulting the nanny’s husband. Then none of this is addressed for about five more episodes.)
Oh, right, back to the police. They shout a lot and chase people up staircases and make them fall off of rooftops and zoom their cars real fast. Poor Sami Kierce suffers from the worst of this dreck, literally stumbling through a drawn-out mysterious medical affliction that includes the most hackneyed possible takes on alcoholism and the single most over-used trope in thriller fiction—it turns out that the A.A. sponsor he’s been talking to for many episodes is actually his dead wife and he’s been hallucinating her this whole time because of Bad Pharma Drugs(tm)! Sami also has a bright-eyed puppy of a young partner, Marty (Dino Fetscher), who we learn is gay because he mentions going on a date with a man, but that’s the extent of it. Marty’s stated sexuality is there to tick a box on some studio executive’s to-do list (“queer representation—check!”), and like everything else here, it’s window-dressing on an empty, bombed-out storefront. Marty and Dino both deserve so much more than this.
Fool Me Once’s biggest problem is its terrible scripts, which lead to slog-through pacing and non-stop behavioral choices that make no sense. People mention one thing, then something else, then walk away mid-conversation. Whole characters are introduced with tremulous import and then vanish. The basic story and its twists here could have formed a fast-paced, snappy thriller, but everything is so disjointed and hollow in its presentation that absolutely nothing packs an emotional punch. The plotting crawls along, taking frequent detours to nowheresville, when it doesn’t leap to batshit conclusions. There’s never any sense of danger, excitement, fear, regret, friendship, love, or the pathos of revenge. There’s never the feeling of anything except confusion and a sort of grudging masochistic push to keep watching after episodic cliffhangers to see if a finale payoff will make this all make sense and be worth your time. (Reader, it does not.)
We’re supposed to care about the loss of Joe and Maya’s sister, Claire, but we only ever see them in a handful of flashbacks that total about three minutes in eight episodes. Everything is wrought in a kind of emotional and dramatic shorthand: Maya is motivated as a mother because she has a daughter and reads her a book sometimes to show that she is a mother. She has a dead sister, and everyone knows sisters are important. If you are a recovering alcoholic, you are damaged and haunted by it. Your police colleagues will reveal and discuss your history of alcoholism in an open office layout and speculate that it is behind anything off-kilter you do with zero compunctions. Boys at posh boarding schools are snobby and cruel, breaking news at 11. Big pharma doesn’t even care about us!!! “They’re using the same technique that was used in that opioid scandal to silence patients,” says a character referred to many times out loud as “Corey the Whistle,” a vaguely Chelsea Manning-inspired super-hacker/whistleblower, to explain what’s happening with the Unscrupulous Rich Pharma Family(tm). That’s all the explanation we get as to the shady goings-on that underpin this thing—it’s just like “that opioid scandal,” sorry to any future generations watching who might want to know more. Just google it very slowly like the characters do, I guess.
I almost forgot my favorite line of dialogue between Maya and Corey the Whistle, when Maya says, straight-faced, “But if I hadn’t have killed those civilians on that helicopter, you wouldn’t have released a tape, Claire would never have met you, and she’d still be home right now with her kids and husband.” But if I hadn’t have killed those civilians on that helicopter. I had to pause the show and do some therapeutic deep breathing at this point. Did I also neglect to mention the subplot wherein Maya, whilst serving abroad, slaughtered several civilians in “that country” (as another character puts it), depicted as a dusty desert stretch somewhere, even though she wasn’t given permission to fire? She’s plagued by constant PTSD flashbacks to the scene and at one point we’re all subjected to watching it play out—the whole bloody exercise is insulting to everyone involved, though you have to appreciate Keegan’s impeccable full face of makeup as she hovers in that helicopter in that country, sighting those civilians to mow down. “Just because I’m used to death doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt,” she tells Corey after the helicopter line.
Perhaps I could’ve forgiven the leaden dialogue and inexplicable storylines (why do we spend hours unraveling that Claire had another son she gave up for adoption, finding and meeting him and his father? Why?) if the conclusion had delivered sufficiently a satisfying twist. But the big reveal is that Maya herself killed her husband Joe, because Joe killed her sister Claire to stop her from revealing Big Pharma and School Ties Crimes. It was pretty easy to guess from the start that Maya killed Joe, since they show him getting shot from mysterious angles and she had a hidden gun that matched the murder weapon. Also because she kept insisting that Joe was extremely dead, despite the attempts to make her think otherwise. The whole nanny cam incident is explained as a deep fake fake-out dreamed up by Joe’s mother to try and get Maya to slip up and expose herself as Joe’s killer. Just how Joe’s mom knew that Maya’s friend had given her a nanny cam and was then able to execute the deep fake fakery and nanny cam hacking in the space of a day is anyone’s guess. I’m too tired.
Because Maya is a straight-up murderer of several people, she of course must also die since she is a morally stained heroine, and so she’s gunned down by Joe’s brother (the one still alive, let’s not forget the other brother Joe killed as a teenager for Psychopathic Rich People Reasons) in possibly the most contrived scene I’ve ever had the displeasure to watch. All the while Dame Joanna Lumley, as Joe’s scheming mother, stares on while I imagine she is mentally texting her agent for getting her involved in this mess. It strikes me now that while we’re meant to be against Evil Pharma Family Corp. for their foul misdeeds, they’re actually correct in trying to entrap Maya for, you know, the crime of murdering her husband. She did very much do that. She also tried to pin said crime on some under-privileged youth but I guess that’s supposed to be fine. She’s a veteran and a mother! While we’re here I have to add my utter bafflement at the presence of Shane (Emmett Scanlan), Maya’s best friend in the military police and frequent errand boy. Shane spends a lot of time as a threatening red herring in that he seems to be stalking Maya and breaking and entering at her house, but it turns out he’s just hanging around, taking up space and completely inconsequential to anything, really, which is the general vibe of Fool Me Once.
Here are a few counter-programming recommendations: if you want to watch posh students wearing masks behaving badly, watch the last season of Endeavour. If you want to watch a big pharma family getting up to ghastly antics, watch The Fall of the House of Usher. If you want to watch police zoom cars around real fast, watch Line of Duty. If you want to admire Adeel Akhtar, watch the exceptional Sherwood. If you want to watch a policeman struggling with inner demons, watch Grace or, once again, Endeavour. If you want to watch an overwrought yet delicious Netflix psychological thriller with hallucinations, watch season 4 of You.
Not every TV show needs to be Emmy-worthy, and not every drama adapted from a popular novel can operate at the level of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. But the sloppy, underbaked, and frankly boring antics of Fool Me Once are infuriating in a world where many excellent properties can’t seem to find footing or funding. There’s no guilty pleasure fun to be had here, just a cynical exercise in betting that most people will be doing other things while this show plays in the background. That Fool Me Once has stayed consistently at #1 on Netflix since its January 1st, 2024 release date makes me question and fear for our collective viewing habits more than anything in recent memory. I guess they got me—I spent much of my time watching while also looking at my phone, slow-googling the cast to wonder how they had ended up subjected to such a fate.
(image: Netflix)
